Fragments from Engelberg: Transcribing and Contextualizing a Medieval Collection in a Missouri Abbey

Dates

2019 - Present

Project Abstract

The library at Conception Abbey (Conception, Missouri) holds thirty-three manuscript leaves and fragments, many of which were a gift from its mother house, Engelberg Abbey, in the late 1870s. These documents served as a teaching collection about medieval paleography for the fledgling seminary at Conception and are a significant cultural inheritance from its mother house. Even as these manuscript leaves are relics of Engelberg's past, they are now an important part of the cultural history of the United States.

Founded in 1120 and still active today, Engelberg (http://www.kloster-engelberg.ch/) had a renowned reputation as a double house of men and women with two libraries and scriptoria. However, book survivals are limited in part because the medieval repository was dispersed by the French army in 1798.

The Engelberg fragments at Conception Abbey show evidence of having been refashioned to support the binding of post-medieval books (possibly at Engelberg itself). These fragments represent something of Engelberg's cultural patrimony and enhance the narrative of Benedictine resettlement in the Americas.

The CODICES team is transcribing and tagging data in these fragments to make them available for synthetic research. Specialists in computing are developing software tools to enable computational searches for fragments with similar algorithmically identifiable features. This project aims to expand access to this collection, understand its context, and contribute meaningfully to existing scholarship on the medieval library at Engelberg.

Project Team

Research Assistants